Widely acclaimed New York Post columnist and crackerjack journalist Andrea Peyser has learned enough about the public and private lives of celebrities to devise a subspecies for many of them.

The species’ label provides the title for her book, “Celebutards,” a rollicking critique of those she says have “either a grandiose notion of their own importance and contribution to the known universe” or human beings of “sub-par intellect, oversized ego and colossal bank account.”

And the barbs just keep on coming in this page-turner in which she observes that celebutards “walk among us, but they are not of us. They eat, sleep and breed just like ordinary human beings. But at some magic moment — between the time, say, a movie script wanders into the hands of a world class celebutard, such as George Clooney, and the words travel through lilting vocal cords to land on unsuspecting ears, something terrible occurs. They start to believe in their own ignorance.”

That ignorance is on full display in this book. As she wanders through the malodorous undergrowth of celebutard land, she cites astonishing instances of sheer ignorance or tendencies to demonstrate "an allergic reaction to ordinary moral sense.”

Tongue in cheek, she claims the word traces to “being from the Latin celebutardus Paris Hiltonus maximum Alex Baldwinus.” Of course, she inducts Hilton and Baldwin into the genus celebutardus, along with small army of other well-known and often obnoxious public figures.

She gives Sean Penn the dubious honor of being the first inductee into the ranks of the celebutards. The son of director Leo Penn, an unrepentant member of the Communist Party at a time when Stalin was butchering tens of thousands of his own people, Sean Penn has hewed to the extreme left anti-American line, finding dictators such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez preferable to his own nation’s leaders.

No. 2 on Peyser’s list is none other than the man who says he invented the Internet and now leads the ragtag army of global warming alarmists as they struggle through recent record snowfalls and shiver through below-zero temperatures: Albert Arnold Gore.

She compares Gore with Paris Hilton, noting that the two have much in common.

“Each have won fame, fortune and the best possible restaurant tables due to his fawning entrée into that most American of institutions, Hollywood. Each has drawn attention to himself, while laying claim to worldwide importance influence comment and privilege, while developing an A-list following of think-alike lemmings.”

Most of her celebutard targets are people you’d expect to find among that genre, but there are a few surprises: Jerry Seinfeld and Oprah Winfrey, for example. No surprise to find convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, who won entrance into the club by virtue of gunning down a young Philadelphia police officer who had committed the unspeakable offense of handcuffing his brother at a traffic stop.

Abu-Jamal is a hero to the left, which sees to it that he is "routinely invited to address college commencements, and municipal and civic organizations for which he provides taped addresses," recorded in his prison cell.

Hilton shares a chapter in this index of fools with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. If shocking ignorance gains you entrée to the pages of this book, the three are simply loaded with it.

Peyser cites three examples of empty-headedness that make any further disclosures superfluous:

“The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.” — Britney Spears on the road

"I am lucky enough to have been able to work with Robert Altman amongst the other greats on a film I can genuinely say created a turning point in my career. He was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years. Be adequate.” — Lindsay Lohan on the director’s death

The tendency to misspell is widespread among the celebutards. Especially Barbra Streisand, who Peyser demonstrates would come in last in a third-grade spelling bee. The author cites one single sentence of Streisand’s in which there are four – count ’em, four — misspellings.

Peyser shows she knows a lot more about them than their publicists would like you to know and obviously has a lot of fun telling us about it. She makes a solid case that they all belong in the celebutard category or perhaps, as I see it, in some glorified loony bin west of Malibu Beach.

Newsmax: How did you come upon the title “Celebutard”?

Peyser: It was dreamed up between myself and my editor, Gary Goldstein, at Kensington books. It was a term that was first used by [New York Post’s] Page 6. It’s a compound of celebrities, debutantes, and retards. Somebody might take offense because he because we never denigrate people who are physically or mentally challenged. However, being a celebutard is a choice rather than an affliction. It is something that a celebrity does consciously.

Newsmax: Why do you put Al Gore and Paris Hilton in the same category?

Peyser: Their power base is the same. Al Gore couldn't get elected president, Paris Hilton got thrown in jail, but they get their power and influence from Hollywood. Al Gore is much more powerful as a celebrity than he ever was as a politician.

Newsmax: It is jarring to find Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop killer, on your list.

Peyser: Mumia Abu-Jamal is a failed radio reporter and a cab driver, and then he murdered a cop, and now he's a celebrity. Susan Sarandon is championing his release from prison. People all over the world, like Nelson Mandela, want him out of prison. And when you press them or look at their words, they don't really care if he did or not — that he really murdered the person.

They just think that there is no justice for a black man in America. The reasoning is okay, he murdered a cop, but that doesn't really matter. He should be released. It makes no sense. It really makes no sense.

Newsmax: You also list Keith Olbermann but didn’t give him his own chapter.

Peyser: He is only a small thing: His ego is larger than his audience. He did give me the great favor of making me his world’s worst person. I was at a ball once and the reporter said to me how do I get to be one of Keith Olbermann's world’s worst persons? It's quite an honor.

Newsmax: Why didn’t Jane Fonda rate a full chapter?

Peyser: I call her the grandmother of celebutards. She tried to live out of that category, but she never can, because she really was the bridge between old Hollywood. In the old days, actors knew to keep their mouths shut about politics and just look good and perform. Jane Fonda was probably one of the first to open her mouth and prove how brain-dead she is.

She went to Vietnam and posed above a tank and was responsible for John McCain getting him an extra beating.

Newsmax: You cited The New York Times as a notorious celebutard.

Peyser: The New York Times is probably the most influential newspaper in this country, if not one of the most influential in the world. You have to read it with sort of subtitles, because chances are, you might get an agenda being pushed through. For one example of many, many examples, The New York Times waged a huge campaign against reform of the welfare system that kept millions of Americans enslaved: Children grew up never seeing an adult go to work. The New York Times was against reform. Now that it was passed during the Clinton administration, it has been an astounding success, so they’ve been kind of quiet about that one.